From Human Trafficking to Human Rights: Reframing Contemporary Slavery (Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights) - Softcover

Buch 17 von 111: Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights
 
9780812222760: From Human Trafficking to Human Rights: Reframing Contemporary Slavery (Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0812222768 ISBN 13: 9780812222760
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

Over the last decade, public, political, and scholarly attention has focused on human trafficking and contemporary forms of slavery. Yet as human rights scholars Alison Brysk and Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick argue, most current work tends to be more descriptive and focused on trafficking for sexual exploitation.

In From Human Trafficking to Human Rights, Brysk, Choi-Fitzpatrick, and a cast of experts demonstrate that it is time to recognize human trafficking as more a matter of human rights and social justice, rooted in larger structural issues relating to the global economy, human security, U.S. foreign policy, and labor and gender relations. Such reframing involves overcoming several of the most difficult barriers to the development of human rights discourse: women's rights as human rights, labor rights as a confluence of structure and agency, the interdependence of migration and discrimination, the ideological and policy hegemony of the United States in setting the terms of debate, and a politics of global justice and governance.

Throughout this volume, the argument is clear: a deep human rights approach can improve analysis and response by recovering human rights principles that match protection with empowerment and recognize the interdependence of social rights and personal freedoms. Together, contributors to the volume conclude that rethinking trafficking requires moving our orientation from sex to slavery, from prostitution to power relations, and from rescue to rights. On the basis of this argument, From Human Trafficking to Human Rights offers concrete policy approaches to improve the global response necessary to end slavery responsibly.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alison Brysk is Mellichamp Professor of Global Governance in the Global and International Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick is Assistant Director of the Center for the Study of Social Movements and Social Change at the University of Notre Dame.

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Introduction
Rethinking Trafficking
Alison Brysk and Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick

Over the last decade, the problem of modern slavery has moved from being a marginal concern to a mainstream issue, with significant advances in levels of public awareness, official engagement, and specialized research. Trafficking in persons for the purposes of forced prostitution has been the primary focal point of this renewed interest in questions of human bondage. From 1865 through 1990 slavery suffered from issue depletion, only to be rediscovered as human trafficking and successfully adopted as a cause célèbre. Scholars, activists, policy makers, and the general public have found the plight of millions to be a departure point for larger conversations about globalization, prostitution, and a host of other issues. While all of this attention is critical, we believe too much of this conversation has been superficial, incomplete, or distorted—leading to a tragically inadequate response. The contributions in this volume stem from a frustration with the status quo understanding of smuggling and outmoded debates around the legalization of prostitution. Our research has shown us new dimensions of the issue that give us the opportunity to push the discourse into original, progressive analysis of rights, slavery, power, and emancipation. Our aim is to move the conversation from sex to slavery, from prostitution to power, and from rescue to rights.

Understanding the Problem

Many advocacy groups cite figures of more than 27 million people worldwide exploited in contemporary forms of slavery, with several million of those forced or tricked across borders (based on Bales [1999] 2004). The U.S. State Department estimates that up to 820,000 men, women, and children are trafficked internationally each year, while the International Organization for Migration cites a rough figure of 800,000 (U.S. Department of State 2009; International Organization for Migration 2011). The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that at least 1.39 million people are victims of commercial sexual servitude worldwide, though this figure includes both transnational and domestic trafficking. The U.S. data suggest that about two-thirds are women and girls. Much of this traffic is from east to west (Europe) or south to north (Latin America to the United States, Southeast Asia to Europe and the United States) (U.S. Attorney General 2007).

The good news is that UN standards, U.S. aid conditionality, and human rights network campaigns have inspired dozens of countries to prohibit trafficking in persons. There are educational, law enforcement, and victim assistance efforts in sending and receiving countries; via regional programs in North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia; and through global bodies such as the International Organization for Migration, the ILO, and UNICEF. The bad news is that almost a decade of antitrafficking programs have done little to reduce the incidence or the harm of the phenomenon, and they may even have diverted attention from root causes of trafficking, as well as equally harmful practices of labor exploitation affecting even greater numbers. Burgeoning recognition of some of the structural determinants of slavery in migration and prostitution has not yet registered in appropriate policies or a deeper reorientation.

Inappropriate or disproportionate policies may result from ill-founded or incomplete understanding. The United States has the most comprehensive policy and has devoted the most bureaucratic and financial resources to the issue of any single receiving country, averaging around $80 million per year over the past decade. Yet its record under the Bush administration clearly shows the limitations of traditional concepts of trafficking in addressing the problem. In the U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act, perhaps the central single piece of legislation, trafficking is defined as when "a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion." Under the Bush administration, the United States ignored the broader UN definition, which encompasses sexual exploitation of voluntary migrants and other forms of nonsexual contemporary slavery. While the U.S. program is theoretically oriented around the "three Ps" of prevention, protection, and prosecution, prevention efforts are quite limited to a handful of education programs, and protection focuses more on training and subsidizing service providers than on direct victim assistance. The bulk of the funding and effort is in law enforcement, both in the United States and abroad. Under the terms of 2003 legislation, renewed in 2005, U.S. policy has even gone so far as to deny funding to health, migration, and sex worker assistance organizations for antitrafficking empowerment and HIV-prevention programs if such NGOs tolerate or advocate decriminalization of commercial sex work As recently as December 2010, congressional Republicans who claim to be concerned with trafficking blocked S.987—the International Protecting Girls by Preventing Child Marriage Act of 2010, a bill expressly designed to address one of the root causes and mechanisms of trafficking.

At the global level, some health workers and scholars believe that an overemphasis on trafficking hinders HIV prevention and empowerment of sex workers to protect themselves, as well as stigmatizing prostitutes on the basis of religion-based ideology (Pisani 2008). Worldwide, antitrafficking programs devote far more attention and resources to prosecution than protection, and still less to prevention. For example, a best-case receiving country sensitive to social context—Australia—has committed almost $7 million per year to combating trafficking in Australia through improving detection and prosecution , while a counterpart sending-country program financed by the ILO in Thailand for prevention through education and job creation provides only around $1 million per year (Australian Government 2009; HumanTrafficking.org 2006). Similarly, the vast majority of policies seek source suppression rather than demand control.

Slavery is wrong, and trafficking is slavery—but so are other, often linked forms of migration and labor. As discussed by Choi-Fitzpatrick (this volume), it is important to recognize the multiple forms that power takes in the enslavement process—it is not always explicit and recognizable coercion. Sexual violence is wrong, but trafficking is not always violent—and some of the violence comes from its suppression and illegality. Women are not always safe at home, within their states, families, or workplaces—and empowering them is more effective than rescuing them.

Trafficking as Contemporary Slavery

Rethinking trafficking as one form of contemporary slavery will help us to see more clearly its roots, consequences, and connections to other forms of exploitive labor and smuggling. Choi-Fitzpatrick's chapter situates trafficking in the larger pattern of contemporary slavery, so we can benefit from the insights of existing scholarship and analyze the sources of the harm as disempowerment. He applies a multifaceted analysis of power to theorize the structural, cultural, and psychological sources of domination. This diagnosis leads to a better understanding of a prescription for emancipation based in the agency of all actors situated along the spectrum of enslavement.

Contemporary slavery may take new forms, but it must fundamentally be understood as an "extension and/or reconfiguration of enduring historical themes, rather than as distinctively modern developments" (Quirk, this volume). Quirk also points out that these "enduring historical themes" must be explored in greater depth, as they have critical and unexamined impacts on antislavery efforts, such as the historic connection between abolition and colonial conquest,...

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Verlag
University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2013
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812222768
ISBN 13 
9780812222760
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
280
Herausgeber
Brysk Alison, Choi-fitzpatrick Austin
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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